Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence officer and contractor who in 2013 leaked a trove of classified documents to select journalists for allegedly principled reasons and then fled the country, has done what anybody in his position would be expected to do: He has written a self-exculpating memoir.
In the acknowledgments to “Permanent Record,” Mr. Snowden, now 36 and a resident of Moscow, thanks the novelist Joshua Cohen for “helping to transform my rambling reminiscences and capsule manifestos into a book that I hope he can be proud of.” I don’t know what a capsule manifesto is, but the evidence of the book suggests that Mr. Cohen wisely urged Mr. Snowden to include more about his life and experiences and so make his account an intermittently sympathetic story rather than just a whiney and muddled indictment of the U.S. government.
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